How many times has you seen on Facebook a message with an extremely "catchy", even cunning title like "an innocent prank that ended up tragedy" or "OMG see what happened after school"? A common feature of these posts is that they refer users to dubious quality websites. Some of them are just to make you "Like" in order to see the content. But others can even infect your computer with viruses or malware.
In the vast majority of cases, these posts are not up by the users themselves, at least not knowingly. Their profile or computer is infected and messages are sent by malware.
In order to protect users from such scams, California University engineers have developed an application that is capable of detecting such posts and listing them as dangerous.
After analyzing a huge set of data, 40 million posts from 12.000 users who installed the application found that their application, which they called MyPageKeeper, is capable of correctly detecting 97% of malware.
"Facebook has replaced e-mail and websites," said Professor of Computer Science at the University, Michalis Faloutsos.
"Hackers follow the same system and we now need new applications like MyPageKeeper to stop them." The professor has also revealed that almost half (49%) Facebook users are exposed to so-called social-malware, a category of malware that spreads through personal messages and posts.
MyPageKeeper constantly scans messages and posts for specific keywords like "Free", "Shocking" and "Fast". The researchers found that among the 100 keywords they set, only 6 is enough to identify malicious posts since most of these messages appear.
So far, the easiest way to find out if a post is dangerous was to see the address to which it refers, which appears at the bottom left of the browser when you place your mouse over the link (without of course clicking). Particular attention is still being paid to addressing shortcuts, such as known goo.gl and tinyurl.com, which may hide malicious websites.
You can download and install MyPageKeeper at apps.facebook.com/mypagekeeper.
Source: Newsbeast.gr